


take hold of the sun

by JoJolightningfingers



Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous Relationships, Blatant Defiance Of Canon, Eventual GrimmIchi, Eye Trauma, M/M, Naked Cuddling, POV Second Person, Platonic Cuddling, Slow Burn, The Inherent Tragedy Of A Hollow's Existence, Touch-Starved, although 'platonic' is a stretch to be honest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:14:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26745715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoJolightningfingers/pseuds/JoJolightningfingers
Summary: None of them, Szayelaporro insisted, remember why they first started eating other Hollows. There must have been a reason. A turning point.How Grimmjow learns to let himself want and seek out warmth.
Relationships: Grimmjow Jaegerjaques & Nelliel Tu Oderschvank, Grimmjow Jaegerjaques/Kurosaki Ichigo
Comments: 41
Kudos: 162





	1. inanición

**Author's Note:**

> I did that thing again where I blacked out for three days and woke up with several thousand words and a brainworm.
> 
> Disclaimer: I never finished the whole Aizen arc of Bleach and I never read anything after that, although I know more or less what happens through osmosis. I have thus decided that the canon is bullshit and have made some changes to it. 
> 
> This IS going to be Grimmichi eventually, I promise, the first chapter is just setup. Sorry for the bait.

You linger in the world because you cursed your fate, your death, your life. This is true of all Hollows—so too is it true of you, whoever _you_ , Grimmjow Jaegerjacques, are or were or became. So your existence is its own punishment: you are multitudes, as are all strong Hollows (as are all cannibals), many dead souls liquefied and poured into iron skin, bound up and thrashing, and consequently you no longer remember what the fate, death, life that you cursed—or rather, _which one—_ is the one that tethered you.

* * *

In the rare moments that your rage burns down enough to allow your body rest, the borders that demarcate your present reality and your memories blur and smear like blood on skin. Just before sleeping and just before waking, you recall ( _snow, breeze on a rocky shore, a stray cat's hiss_ ) images, sensations, most washed out and meaningless, after who knows how many years.

Peripherally, you've heard Szayelaporro discussing things like this with Aizen, although you rarely stayed long enough to devote them your full attention. The Octava Espada is a dyed in the wool freak; you make it a point not to be around him more than you have to be. Very base parts of you squirm in his presence, at the reality of his existence. He reverted himself from a Vasto Lorde down to an Adjuchas and kept his mind... _intact_ probably isn't the right word, unhinged as the bastard is, but he is lucid, functional. You get the feeling he wouldn't so much as blink at the thought of devouring you should he ever get it in his head to regain his old power, never mind having _qualms_ over it.

One of the conversations you have caught in passing detailed how those flashbacks resurge with greater frequency after eating, and so the question is: are these memories yours, awakening using flesh as a catalyst? Or are they a symptom of integration, of taking another being into your own?

Another conversation: is that why some Hollows are first driven to consume their own kind? Hoping for scraps of a warmth denied them, present in the subconscious of their kin as jealously guarded memories of touch and tenderness? None of them, Szayelaporro insisted, remember _why_ they first started eating other Hollows. There must have been a reason. A turning point.

You, being of cold hate and anger that you are, you do not know anymore the language of softness that humans speak, if you ever did. Your kisses are all given in steel and fang, all of your caresses cleave bone deep. Hollows only ever touch to kill. You keep your hands off others unless you mean to wring their necks, and they do the same to you. It is a universal understanding shared by all in Hueco Mundo.

You suppose, then, that Szayelaporro's guesswork is as correct as any other theory on the subject. It is a discomfiting thought. You lick the blood of a helpless, squirming Gillian off your thumb and kick it in the throat to make it shut up its pathetic mewling. You're not done eating yet.

Next time you find your bed, tongue tasting of rot and copper, you dream up an embrace, palms sliding along skin that isn't numbed by hierro, a whole body's weight bearing you down with the concept of _safe_. You wake up sweating, ice cold.

All of you, you ten Espada, all of you are possessed of this same affliction, though some hide it better than others. And being what you are, there is nothing that you can do about it.

Even if you could ease that specific starvation with your pride intact, you would not _want_ to with the present company. You spare no consideration for the weaker Espada; they’re distasteful, hardly worthy. Nnoitora, you are certain, would try to eat you for even thinking about it too loudly in his presence. Ulquiorra's reiatsu is the emptiest thing in this empty world, he would be no comfort to anybody. Harribel tolerates you, barely, and should not be pushed to test that tolerance; Baraggan would dismantle you and warm you coldly with your own blood. Starrk doesn't seek you or others out; he has his precious other half, his little Lilynette.

Aizen and his sharks have ice running through their veins instead of blood.

And so the pattern is recursive; everything you eat loathes just as much as you do, thus your own hatred multiplies with every mouthful. It is, empirically, simply too much for one spirit to support alone.

You don't know how Aaroniero does it.

* * *

Much later, when Las Noches has fallen and you are bleeding out in the sand, you are found. _This is it_ , you think, all blunted anger; you will face your death in disgrace, paralyzed like a fly in a spiderweb. The blurred shadow towering over you crouches down, you catch a flash of sun-color, a hint of gold. Arms gather you, heft you, and the pain from your wounds blacks you out.

Your eyes open; that is the first surprise. Your eyes open and your innards are still _in_ nards, your skin is unbroken, if still oddly tender in that way that a fresh regeneration is. Directly above your head a vaulted ceiling stretches to an unknown height, swallowed by Hueco Mundo’s abyssal dark. A staircase climbs the inside wall in a spiral, uninterrupted by any floors between the ground you lay on and the top of the tower.

You allow gravity to pull your head to one side to assess your surroundings somewhat better and find Nelliel Tu Oderschvanck curled and sleeping at the opposite wall with her knees tucked halfway to her chest, her head pillowed on her arms and her thick teal mane of hair blanketing her from the waist up.

When you try and express your bewilderment with a heartfelt _what the fuck_ , all that issues from your throat is a gravelly wildcat growl. It is still enough to wake her; not a single other thing moves, but her pale eyes open and lock on you, and her reiatsu gains the weight of consciousness.

There is a span of time that is likely only seconds but feels more like eternity, where you and she communicate in a wordless, motionless exchange. You surmise that if you cannot even speak, you have no hope of moving anywhere close to fast enough to get the upper hand on her and devour her. She understands your position (you are of a kind, after all) and yet her eyes soften somewhat, her posture turns even further languid, confirming to you outright that she does not consider you a threat.

That chafes, her audacity, but your animal instinct reminds you that no matter how the rankings stand now, depending on which Espada remain, she is still stronger than you. So you curl your lip and let your muscles slacken, trying again to speak. It goes better this time. "Why the fuck am I still alive."

"Ichigo and the others," Nelliel explains, though truly it doesn't explain a goddamn thing. "He didn't want you to die."

" _Kurosaki?_ " you rasp, disbelieving and feathered with the beginnings of _truly pissed off._ You remember, in a flash, being sprawled supine and staring at his back, at the sparks that sprang up where Zangetsu and Santa Teresa ground against each other, the same color as the Soul Reaper’s hair. That Kurosaki had the gall to be so soft as to spare your life after tearing you apart the way he did, that funnels rage into your leaden limbs and gives you the strength to push yourself upright.

And then you remember, you are not as injured as you should be. Your clothes are stained with blood, yes, but you are completely mobile. You flex your hands, roll your wrists, and everything feels... fine. But you still feel hunger gnawing your gut, and that confuses you.

"He had Inoue fix you up. You were lucky."

You don't agree, but that's not worth disputing immediately. "So why are you here, Tres Espada? You take orders from him instead of Aizen now?"

Her smile is thin and sharp as a knife. "He saved me; I owed him a favor. If it assuages your pride, I would have left you to bleed out if he hadn't asked me to look after you."

You scoff, and head for the chink in the thick wall that serves as a door to the tower. Just as you're ducking out of it, she sticks a leg out and hooks your ankle, tripping you flat on your face in the sand. You rear back all fire and fury and spit at her, "Bitch, are you _trying_ to start a fight?!"

She sits up, finally, and leans back against the wall, cool in the face of your outburst in a way that makes you feel vaguely juvenile. "He had something he wanted me to tell you when you woke up, too. You might wanna hear it."

"Then _say so_ next time instead of fucking around with practical jokes. What's the big important message, then?"

"He said, 'If you stay out of the way for four more days, with Nel, I'll fight you again when all of this is over. We're at one win each so the next will decide it. Get better quick.'"

That _prick_.

* * *

You stay with Nelliel because truly you have no good reason to go wandering, weakened, in the desert until the dust settles. You have spent much of your existence in the company of Hollows who you did not hold any special care for: Nelliel is only the latest, and she is only one Hollow, so surely she will be easier to coexist with than an overlarge castle teeming with insufferable personalities. Certainly, she is more tolerable now than the squalling little gap-toothed waif you met her as.

You are not, you insist to yourself, indulging the Soul Reaper. You are challenging him. _Keep your word like you always do and find me when you said you would. Otherwise, I'll chase you down and rip your throat out for making me wait._

If Nelliel has any opinion on your decision to remain with her, she wisely keeps it to herself. In point of fact, past that initial talk, you hardly say more than a handful of words to each other for at least a day. You go out to hunt like you meant to before she tripped you, and she joins you at a distance, mute. Hours later, you both return with full bellies and bloody hands, which you cleanse in the powder-fine sand. Time passes, and with nothing else pressing or interesting to do, you sleep.

And you startle awake, later, with fire imprinted behind your eyes, red-colored splinters of memory about kisses that smudged marks on your skin, and about your palms, sticky and carmine, wrenching with desperate futility at a steel pole embedded in your guts. Your palm covers the void in your belly before your ego asserts itself, while you are still gripped by a wholly unfamiliar terror.

Your own ragged breathing aggravates you. You intend to leave your refuge briefly and find something to eviscerate as a means of working out some energy, but you have only just gotten to your feet when you realize that Nelliel is sitting in the shaft of moonlight spilling from the higher windows, staring right at you, and probably has been the whole time. Despite yourself, you freeze, and of course she takes your hesitation as an opportunity to try and strike up conversation.

"You were shaking," she says, and you are not in the mood to entertain her, so you step around her and duck out the tower, taking care to knee her pretty hard on your way out. She sways with the blow like she'd seen it coming, flattens on the floor with a little grunt that is its own small satisfaction, and does not pursue you.

It angers you all over again that you know the reason for that is probably that she's guessing she doesn't need to; that she knows you'll be back regardless of what she chooses to do. Fuck her. Fuck Kurosaki. Fuck those dreams. What really rankles about it is that she's right. You come crawling straight back after blowing off some steam (there's a mile-deep crater off to the east that wasn't there before), feeling a little more able to straighten out the crossed wires in your head. Nelliel is humming some stupid little song to herself, combing her fingers through her hair absentmindedly. She scoots aside from the entrance when she hears your sandals scuff on the sandstone outside.

You return to the spot you've claimed as your own, but deep down you know sleep isn't forthcoming. Though you're not at risk of boiling over anymore, you're still too keyed up for it, and Nelliel is staring at you too hard, and you hate the look in her eyes too much. You glare back at her, daring her to continue her earlier line of thought now that you can't leave again and retain any dignity. You imagine what it'd be like to carve out her vocal cords with your claws.

Though she never takes her eyes off you (and you, her), she lets you simmer in relative peace, moving on from untangling to braiding, all the while humming. You are still metaphorically circling each other long after her melody finally dies, long after she has finished fiddling with her hair and folded her hands in her lap all patient-like, and the glint in her eyes is cooly expectant in a way that it didn't use to be. Like it's her god-given _right_ to know what's going on in your head.

You should kill her for the presumption. You’ve no inkling why what comes out of your mouth is, instead, "Get on with it."

She arches an eyebrow at you. "Get on with what, exactly? I'd have attacked you already if I was looking for a fight." The _and so would you_ that she omits is somehow all the more pointed by its absence. You don't know how she managed that, or why you find it impressive, grudgingly.

"You got something you want to say? Spit it out. This is your one and only chance, Tres Espada. Next time you play touchy-feely with me I'll take your fucking head off."

Nelliel's face flickers through a few emotions—you pick out brief surprise, then amusement, then she settles on a warm neutral. Her head tilts to one side, spilling a curl of teal down one shoulder. She's not smiling, but she isn't frowning either. You are rapidly beginning to regret that you ever said anything.

But she doesn't tease you, merely reaches up to touch the fissure in her mask, looking faintly reminiscent. "Hollows... we're not thought of as social, not even amongst ourselves. Just look at us Espada: not a single one of us are really _friends_ with each other, are we."

"Yeah," you say flatly. Friendship requires vulnerability. A vulnerable Hollow is a dead Hollow. Even so, her words have you unconsciously considering which of your fellows nettled you the least. Harribel, maybe, though it's perhaps significant that that assessment hinges on you having not interacted with each other extensively. Your mouth thins in a hard line.

Nelliel's fingertips drum across one of her mask's horns, her nails clicking off the bone in rhythm. "Even so. Even so, at one point, we were human, and humans need those connections. That contact. Without it, they turn into... well, us." The clicking stops; her hand drops to a point below her navel, shrouded in shadow at the angle you're at. "That's the whole reason Hollows eat humans, remember. To fill that hole. So why are we all so ashamed for trying to?"

"Ashamed?" The word leaps out of you before you can swallow it back, too quick to be characteristic. "Speak for yourself, Nelliel. You've got some weak-hearted ideas rattling around that broken skull of yours."

Her only reaction to your added barb is to frown slightly, gaze narrow in a way that speaks to unamusement. "If you're trying to convince me that you've never wanted more than anything to feel whole, even if just for a second, you're failing quite badly, Grimmjow."

Ah, there's your old friend ire, seeping out of your bones again. Despite the olive branch you offered her, you're not about to sit here and let her act like she knows a single thing about you. Before Nnoitora nearly killed her, you'd barely even known each other; who does she think she is? You bare your teeth at her. "I don't need anybody."

"Right," she snaps, a smartass tone you've never heard her take, one that makes your fangs itch for blood. "That's why you had _five_ Fracciónes, because you didn't need a single one of them."

You're across the room with a hand around her throat just as her last word leaves it. Your fingers don't even have time to tighten before her grip snaps shut on your wrist like a steel trap. In the millisecond that your self-preservation instinct activates, she tears your hand off her neck, backshifts her weight, and nails you in the solar plexus with her other elbow. You don't go anywhere, because she's still holding you, and truthfully that might be worse than going through the wall and into a dune, if only because you now can't hide how you gag for breath and hit the ground with all the grace of a pile of wet laundry when she lets go of you.

It didn't hurt half as bad when Tousen cut your arm off, god _damn_.

She's condescending enough (or decent enough, by this point you can't decide which) to wait for you to be able to breathe without wanting to retch again before she says another word to you. When she does, her voice is revoltingly kind. "Grimmjow. It's okay to want to be near someone. It doesn't make you weak. It's just part of what we are."

To that you only have a wet, inarticulate snarl and a halfhearted swipe of claws, which she pays no mind to. "So what," you croak, cradling your (maybe fractured) sternum with one hand and using your other to lever your unresponsive body to something that might resemble sitting, given a bit more time and effort. "Is there a point to this little lecture?" Each syllable feels like it's stabbing you on the way out of your lungs, _damn_ her. "Or are you just talking to hear yourself talk?"

"There will be soon enough, if I don't get interrupted again," she says, with a tiny impish smirk that sends something cold and primal trickling down your spine. Luckily for you, the expression fades as she turns all serious again. "What I'm trying to say is, I thought similarly to you, once." She leans against the wall with her elbows in her palms, gaze pensive and not aimed at you. "But if I'd been alone when Nnoitora threw me in the desert, I'd have died. The only reason I didn't is because I had Dondochakka and Pesche with me.

"You know, I had those dreams and nightmares out there too. If I'd been by myself, I..." She shrugs, her mouth a little rueful twist. "Probably would have bawled and screamed and attracted something very big and very hungry. I'm lucky, to have had someone to hold when I needed it. It was the best part of what had happened to me."

You curl a lip at her, grabbing hold of the weird, tangled emotion starting to curdle in your guts and strangling it. You know what she's trying to tell you, as oblique as her delivery is, and you don't want it. No, be honest—what it is is that you don't _want_ to want it. "So what," you repeat, gaining your feet again and bringing to bear every inch of height you have over her, every ounce of predator you own. She blinks, but otherwise seems unimpressed, looks at you as though you're transparent. "I couldn't give less of a fuck what shit you and your boy toys got up to, Nelliel. You're damn full of yourself if you think I'm desperate enough to crawl into bed with you."

Her stance loosens, somehow; she seems at once exasperated, exhausted, disappointed. "This far out in the middle of nowhere, who would care if you are or not? I don't." With the same precision that she wields her blade, she drives a question just as piercing past all of your defensive bullshit. "What do you have to lose, Grimmjow?"

You can feel your face betraying you, features etching the furrows of a scowl into your brow, but every answer that leaps to the forefront of your mind becomes ash on your tongue. There is nothing you can say that would be true. She watched Kurosaki cut your pride out from underneath you with your defeat, she watched him shame you further by refusing to let Nnoitora give you the death you justly earned and that he denied you. Everything you could cling to is false, and she would know it.

A muscle in your temple jumps. Hueco Mundo's cemetery silence shatters on your hissed-out curse. "Fuck you, Nelliel." You turn around and cross to your side of the tower, lay down with your back turned to her in the shadow of the spiral staircase, and say nothing.

For a moment, you dare to hope that’s the end of it. Then the soft sound of her footsteps echoes dully in the quiet, louder by fractions the closer she comes to you. You remain immobile as she circles to your front, only acknowledging her presence when she kneels before you, and only with a flicker of your eyes up to lock with hers. She holds your stare until you break it and return to glaring holes in the wall. You make no noise, no protest, no motion to help or hinder when she ducks beneath your arm and fits herself chest to chest with you, the smooth bone of her mask against your throat, her slender arm draped over your waist. With crushing gentleness, she feels her way down your back until she finds the void in you, and shields it with her palm.

You hate it. You hate how it tingles beneath your hierro. You hate how your eyes slide closed and your limbs come loose and your breath shakes out. You hate the way you let your hand find the matching hole just above her tailbone, and guard it just as pointlessly. You hate that she was right about you needing this.

You hate that you do not want to move away, when you wake up and she is still tucked against you, her lean legs having tangled up with yours sometime in the intervening hours. You hate your own certainty that now that you've had this, you will crave it to your dying gasp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i sure do have a lot of feelings about touch starvation, huh.
> 
> Things that are canon only to this fic:  
> \- As far as I'm concerned, the Bleach story proper ends at the end of the Aizen arc. Assume any lingering plot threads that bleed into the last two arcs are either yanked out completely or tied up somewhere offscreen.  
> \- Nel curbstomped Nnoitora before Zaraki even got there and she doesn't just randomly transform out of her adult form after regaining it because it makes no fucking sense that she does. She's also a little more Tres Espada and a little less woobie-with-a-mask.


	2. primer bocado

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back with more brainworms! This chapter is 30% shorter than the last one, and I'm sorry about that. Will the knowledge that this is going to be overall much longer than I ever planned for it to be make up for that? I'm thinking perhaps a total of three, maybe even four chapters depending on how things go. Fun!!

You count the minutes until Nelliel wakes up, and then you count the minutes that you spend pretending to be asleep and she spends pretending she doesn't know that you're awake. You could be entombed together, for how little either of you move.

Your count reaches thirty-seven before Nelliel extricates herself and slips out into the quiet world beyond your haven. You wait for the pressure of her reiatsu and the current coursing beneath your skin to fade before rolling to your feet, all your joints crackling with sleep-stiffness. Looking to wet your throat, you set off in the opposite direction that she did, in search of hapless prey.

Though no further mention is made of that morning—in fact, you are back to not speaking to one another whatsoever—it repeats itself twice more, each time in total silence. As convalescent periods go, it's the strangest you’ve yet endured.

* * *

You have grown accustomed to your mutual silence in this pocket of nowhere, so Nelliel springing to her feet with no warning during what passes for afternoon in a world of endless night is more of a startle than you feel it should be. The Tres Espada sports an ear to ear grin that exacerbates the on-edge feeling in the pit of your stomach, and you’re about to snap at her about what the big idea is before you sense what has her all excited.

“ _There_ he is,” you growl, a smirk tugging up the corner of your mouth that your mask hides, despite yourself. In nearly the same breath, Nelliel calls out, "Ichigo!" and swoops out of the tower like a weasel on the hunt. You're hot on her heels, pulse thundering in your fingertips, in your neck and jaw.

He doesn't keep you waiting much longer. A speck of gold in the tar-colored sky off in the direction of the ruined Las Noches grows and grows, deepens and reddens and finally, the Soul Reaper lands in the sand just out of your blade's reach. You step toward him, Pantera a handspan free from its sheathe, and Nelliel beats you to him. She catches the Soul Reaper in a bonecrushing hug (you are somewhat gratified that he yawps and flails a little) before setting him down. "How did it go? Is everyone okay?"

Brought up short, you can't think of anything to do but stare dumbly at how freely Nelliel clings to him. Kurosaki hasn't changed in appearance much since your last meeting, aside from missing his shihakushou from the waist up. Despite having been through a no doubt grueling battle, his skin is unmarred by any wound. The girl's handiwork, undoubtedly. "Yeah, we did it," he's saying, massaging his ribs, "we all made it out alive."

And then he turns to you, as though he's only just now noticing your presence. It takes mere moments for his expression to shutter—you realize how warmly he looks at and talks to Nelliel only after he has pulled that warmth back from the surface and hidden it somewhere you would have to disembowel him to find. His eyes glint, hard and frigid as gemstones. "Grimmjow."

You grin at him with all your teeth, the ones both inside your mouth and out. "Soul Reaper."

Nelliel unobtrusively takes a step back from your line of sight.

You wait for him to make the first move, to charge you with all that determination that he had before, but he doesn't. He's sizing you up, hands held loose at his sides, not making so much as one twitch towards the sword across his back. This is something akin to torture for you. "Well?" you bark, drawing Pantera with a clean flick of your wrist. You notice his weight shift to one side, a tic in his fingers at the steely scrape of your sword coming free.

Kurosaki stares you square in the eyes and folds his arms over his naked chest. "I have a condition." He's copping an awfully high and mighty tone for your taste; you've had just about enough of waiting around but as a parting gift, you decide to humor him before you set about the business of carving him up.

"Oh do you now," you all but purr.

"First, I want you to know that I'm fine with doing this." He gestures vaguely in your direction, perhaps at your blade. "But you're gonna leave my friends and my home out of it." His brows tighten into a hard V, and you withhold a snip of laughter at the memory of that other Reaper's blood under your nails and streaking down your forearm. "You want a fight, fine, I'll let you pick the when from now on. But the _where_ is here, always."

That gets a raised eyebrow. He's giving you free rein to open a Descorrer near him whenever you want? Would be intriguing, if he was going to live past the next hour. "That it?"

"That's it. Otherwise I'll have to apologize to Inoue for taking your arm again."

God, you're gonna enjoy watching the life drain out of him. A cackle breaks its way out of you, dissipating on the breeze stirring the sand around his ankles. "Tell you what," you sneer, fingering Pantera's hilt and pointing the blade at him, directly at the heart it hungers for. "If you can take me down in less than a minute, I'll consider playing along."

His eyes flit wider near too quick to be observed, but he nods once and reaches over his shoulder for the outsize butcher's knife he likes to call a sword. "Then this'll be quick."

" _Cocky_ little fucker, ain'tcha!?"

His power flares up in red and black, and you cast the preliminaries to the wind yourself. Pantera answers your summons and crowns you in your white and blue. The dust kicked up by the gale of your combined reiatsu has not even thought of settling earthward before you clash, his blade like a slice of gleaming hell throwing sparks off your hierro. Behind his mask, the Reaper's eyes are alight with that fury gold, so much more intense when his sclera's normal light doesn't outshine it. Blood floods in your body like a storm surge. You cannot stop your own manic grin.

The Soul Reaper's face, obscured by his stolen mask, is unreadable. Battle-buried parts of you hope nonetheless that the mouth beneath it is grinning just like it is, skeletal and lipless.

Despite what he may think of you, you are no mindless war machine—Hollows like that don't get to where you've gotten. You would know, you've eaten plenty of them. You do not lose often, but when you do, you learn from it. The first strike is yours, five long gouges your claws leave in his chest while he shields his face from your tail. The new red stain on your bone white arm, the rent sound he makes, they are things that you prize beyond few others.

By the time you have removed yourself from his strike distance safely, his blood has already cooled and the phantom of his body's warmth succumbed to entropy. You rue its loss and wonder why, a heartbeat later.

Why do you care that you are cold?

The fight goes poorly, after that. This sickness stirring fever in you directs too much mental power to that question lodged like a thorn in your skull. You feel—off balance, consumed. You parry Kurosaki's strikes running off muscle memory and little else, breath tearing through your fangs, and so he manages to nick you, stripe your own blood down your collarbone.

It does not scorch like his does. It aches, but not at the injury—in the gaping hole in your belly. Your fingertips are numb and your heart rattles around your ribcage like a handful of knucklebones. You are so hungry that it _hurts_. The preoccupation becomes an avalanche, its cascading, all-encompassing roar reverberating with the clangor of steel and your own pulse in your ears. You find you cannot grasp and subdue it, any more than you can bring any other natural disaster to heel.

You are _alive_ , in a way that you can only ever feel when death is close enough to taste—vibrantly, terrifyingly.

At the end, his Getsuga Tenshou swallows up the stars and the moon and your Desgarrón. It hammers you down, a black wave breaking on a promontory, tears into your skin and grinds against your bones. It’s a horrendously cold pain and you know even before you lose the energy to sustain your Resurrección that you’ve lost.

Again. You don’t scream only because doing so would be agonizing in more ways than one.

High above, you can see Kurosaki descending and Nelliel making her way over. Enticing as it is to burrow further into the sand, you are not about to die on your back like prey. A king looks his end in the eyes when it comes for him. You struggle to your feet, shedding blood and desert; your knees wobble, but hold.

Kurosaki wipes his mask away, the motion almost absentminded. “Are you done?” he asks, eyeing your white-knuckle grip on Pantera. He hasn’t sheathed Zangetsu, or reverted it. Your head is still ringing acquisitive bells, and you just want it to fucking _shut up_. You lunge for him, sword first, hoping that either you’ll kill him or he’ll put you out of your misery.

You don’t even get that far. Two steps in your legs buckle and the world lurches sideways, tunneling at the fringes. When it stops spinning, you hear Kurosaki saying somewhere above you, “Yeah, that’s that.”

“Like _hell_ it is,” you hiss. You command yourself to rise and your legs obey; you deafen yourself to their complaints. “This isn’t over until one of us is dead.”

Kurosaki’s eyes slide from Pantera, tip quivering and only half raised, to the wound he overlaid across the scar from the first one, to your face. “I already said I’m not gonna kill you, Grimmjow,” he says, and now you know where Nelliel contracted that sentimental look (as if there was ever any doubt). “Nel—”

“Don’t _fuck_ _around_ with me, Soul Reaper!” you roar, and you can’t even take satisfaction in seeing him jump like a rabbit. There is simply no space in your head for it, between the bruised pride and the wrath it leaks. “Get the fuck off your high horse and kill me if you’re gonna fight me. Otherwise don’t bother, just stand still and let me _put you down!_ ”

It takes all you have left to swing at him, one final desperate slash. You ignore Nelliel shouting your name, rough and angry, you blank out everything, absolutely everything but the gentle mercy in Kurosaki’s eyes and the animal scream of your own enmity.

Nothing comes of it. Kurosaki catches the strike on his sword, easy as anything, and twists Pantera adroitly from your grasp. You follow through regardless, attempting to hook your claws into the wounds you inflicted earlier and shear them wide.

You think, as he clamps your wrist and stares you in the eyes, that you’ve been here before. There is no levity in it. “Grimmjow, _stop_ ,” he says, sounding like a weary plea, as if he’s begging for his life. As if you’re not the one that should be doing that. As if he didn’t win. You didn’t think you could get any angrier at him, and yet. “If you wanna die, do it on your own. I don’t want to kill you.”

“Why not.” There’s a deep throb in the beds of your molars; you make yourself unclench your jaw before you crack one. “Is it fun for you, Soul Reaper? Acting all saintly ‘cause you’ve decided to be gracious and spare a poor soul’s life? Or am I not even worth killing to you?!”

Kurosaki lets go. You think it may have more to do with the confusion painting his face than anything voluntary. “I—wh... wait, _do_ you want to die or something?”

“Fuck kind of question is that,” you grumble, vainly bringing a hand to pressure the wound. You’re really starting to feel the blood loss now. Everything feels woozy, drunk.

“Grimmjow—” You jerk your shoulder to dislodge the hand that lands on it, glaring side-eye at Nelliel.

“Hands off.” She looks like she wants to roll her eyes, but steps back.

“I don’t know where you got the idea that I’m all holier than thou like that, but... no, that’s not why I’m not killing you.” Kurosaki’s mouth pinches up in thought, a little crease wrinkling his forehead. “It’s more like... Fighting you is somehow... satisfying, I guess. I like it. And...” He seems to locate the thought he was looking for, meets your disbelieving stare steadily. “And I don’t think this is as strong as you can get. You’re gonna be the king, right? That’s why not. Yeah...” His weight shifts in the sudden trailing discomfort.

You have no fucking idea what to say. For the longest time you just goggle at him, bleeding all over your fingers and hakama.

Eventually Kurosaki clears his throat, hastily dismissing his bankai and turning to Nelliel as he puts it away. “So, uh—Nel, time?”

“Time—oh, yeah. Fifty-six seconds.”

You glance at her, uncomprehending still for a moment more, and then you remember. Kurosaki’s little condition. You roll a discontented noise around the back of your throat and he looks at you. “So? Do we have a deal?” Thinks he’s so damn cool. You could still punch a hole in his chest, you believe you yet have energy to spare for that—moreover, you really want to, and he’s so close to you, easily in reach.

What wins out is, as ever, the relentless hunger common to all Hollows, as Nelliel said. What wins out is the part of you with his blood flaking off your fingers, the heart that hangs like overripe fruit in your chest.

The idea of perhaps seeing Kurosaki panic when you shred the sky open inches from his face is admittedly tempting too. See how that tough-guy act serves him then. You wring a smirk out of your lips. “Fine. You’ve got a deal, Soul Reaper. No murdering your merry men.” Nelliel prods you with Pantera’s hilt and you take it, unthinkingly.

“Even if you end up killing me next time?”

Ever the wary one, huh? You grin, pointedly sheathing your sword with a loud _snick_. “Well you’ll have to try real hard to make sure that doesn’t happen, won’t you? And don’t go dying before I come for you either. Your head is _mine_ , and nobody else’s.”

* * *

They leave you there, shortly after, at your own unyielding insistence. Nelliel takes Kurosaki through Garganta back to his mirror life, where he can play at being a normal boy with normal concerns. You can’t help wondering where the appeal in that lies—or what good he thinks it’ll do him, when he knows good and well that you’re out for him. Perhaps it’s a human oddity.

The rift sews closed with a whisper and you tilt your head back to burn the moonlight into your eyelids while you consider that most universal of conundrums—what are you going to do now? Premeditation, leaving aside the sort that predators engage in whilst stalking prey, has never been your forte. Your life’s plan was little more than nebulous ‘survival of the fittest’ dogma—you joined hands with Aizen because he promised you the power to outlast your kin, and you stayed with him at the chilling epiphany that he could snuff you out at any point he chose to. He’s gone now, and too much has changed for the idea of aimlessly wandering the wasteland to be particularly appealing.

Your ask yourself instead, what are you going to do _first?_ A simple question with a simple answer. Do something about this giant fucking laceration in your front. A few dead Hollows later, you change the question again—what are you going to do _next?_ You ponder that one somewhat deeper, now that you’re in no danger of bleeding out.

Kurosaki didn’t bruise you when he halted your claws, yet below the surface in the shape of his hand lingers a tenderness like a macerated cyst, persistent but not anymore intrusive. Next, you figure, you’re going to deal with whatever sort of malady _that_ is.

Nelliel smiles when you demand to fight with her the day after she returns, unsheathing Gamuza without a word beyond ‘okay’. The thought hits later that she may have hoped you’d ask, so you’d stick around, so she could infect you further. You give her a few new scars for her trouble, and she in turn melts down your power and forges you anew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> new note about this canon: i dialed Aizen's powers way the hell back because truly the power escalation in bleach is stupid and consequently it takes much less effort for him to be put down. ichigo is a bit stronger after dealing with him than he was after dealing with grimmjow/ulquiorra, but not to the ridiculous extent he would be. having a lot of captains come in to help you shitstomp him will do that.


	3. difícil de tragar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hahahaha oh man. oh man oh man oh man. the tone really goes places in this one, sorry.  
> warning for brief and slightly graphic mentions of eye trauma this chapter.

Time, such as it exists in Hueco Mundo, falls once more into rhythm. Your days turn palindromic, adhering to the same rise and fall with every repetition. You wake. You eat. You fight. You eat. You sleep. It’s a sight more exciting than life under Aizen was, with his restrictive orders and his inexhaustible patience. It feels more genuine, in spite of everything _wrong_ with each and every aspect of the routine.

You wake, and never alone. You eat, in service of—rather than as—a goal. You fight, but not to kill. You sleep, and hallucinate sunlight where there is none—only smooth bone shielding your throat. You know from your training that Nelliel’s blood is just as tepid as your own. It is inadequate. It does not satisfy. You let this cycle repeat as long as you can stand to, and then you chase down your craving.

* * *

The living world assaults your senses when your portal yawns wide into the dark night you step into. Karakura slumbers around the snarling urban engine it depends on; diesel fills your nose with every inhale. Clouds diffuse the moon’s harsh glow, and their deluge distills that light to liquid silver, turning rooftops and roads into messy collections of jagged mirror edges. The sunken sun’s residual heat thickens the air and leaves the taste of petrichor on your tongue.

You’d almost forgotten rain. For a moment, you stay where you hang in the air with it all around you, leaching the humidity off your skin. If not for the precipitation, it could be any night in the desert. You shake the musing and search out the soul you’re looking for.

He’s not the first one you make contact with, though. You’re intercepted on your way there by a hailstorm that comes at you sideways, and at its origin, a slender shadow sapped of all color save for black and white. You can’t help laughing when you recognize the face and the blade. “Yo, Soul Reaper! Your warm welcomes could use a little work!”

Kuchiki stares at you, jaw set, her pale sword held at the ready. When she gets close enough to make out the shape of your mask, you have the pleasure of watching her blanch and instinctively shift her guard to her abdomen, eyes wide. “You—?”

You toy with the idea of taunting her a little more, but she recovers too rapidly for you to make the decision to. She flashes toward you and swings, the point of her sword trailing water. There’s a kind of feral beauty in that response and you let out a laugh as you block with your bare arm. The blade bites, but doesn’t pierce through, though she strains and hisses breath.

“Now that’s more like it!” you praise, pushing back on her strike. She changes her grip and leans her weight to keep the pressure on. Pity her sword’s not as sharp as her glare—if looks could kill, she’d have impaled you already. “Feeling vengeful tonight, huh?”

Under her breath, she snarls something that you don’t quite make out, but it sounded uncannily like ‘You’ve no idea.’ For your ears, she spits, “Be quiet, Espada. What do you think you’re doing here again?”

“Like you really have to ask?”

The younger Soul Reapers are all of a kind—insinuations send their assumptions into a frenzy, and they make a particular kind of face when they do it. Wide eyes, mouth thin and bloodless, terror and horror on full display. It’s a marvelous expression and you mostly told her this way to see how long it would take her to lock it away and double down on her earnest attempt to kill you. She doesn’t disappoint, you see it flare up and burn down in the time it takes to breathe in and out. She jerks her sword from your arm and leaves a notch on the way, thin and stinging.

“If you think I’ll simply let you do as you please—”

They’re all so _serious_ too. You despise that about them. Luckily for her, you have a promise to honor. You override what is no doubt shaping up to be some droll and dutiful speech. “I’m here for Kurosaki, not you or anybody else. We had a deal.”

To her credit, she barely misses a step changing tack. “And what sort of deal would he ever make with you?”

“If he didn’t fill you in, why should I bother to? Get him to explain it next time you see him. _If_ there’s a next time.”

You lean left; four feet of steel sings past your ear. Kuchiki twists her wrist to divert the strike and you draw Pantera halfway to take the impact. The ringing barely registers above the downpour soaking you both. You raise your free arm as if to charge a cero and she leaps from your reach, as you’d hoped. You let your sword drop back into the scabbard and put your hands in your pockets, then simply leave in a rush of sonido. If she’s so hellbent on rushing to her death or finding out the truth, she’ll follow you. You don’t care either way. After Kurosaki, you’ll dance with her last—it’d be a fitting bookend for the demise of their group. A smirk surfaces at the idea. But there is an order to these things.

Kurosaki, unbelievably, is sleeping when you arrive—admittedly, not for long, since you don’t concern yourself with being gentle with his window. He jolts up like a marionette when the frame bangs and the glass rattles, grabbing something off a small endtable. You can see the whites all the way around his eyes as you slide your way into his room.

Your greeting is uncomplicated. “You awake now? Good. Let’s get going.”

His reiatsu spiked when you entered, carrying a tang of fear, but now that he knows it’s you, he masters it quickly. His face and energy both smooth over; he now only looks annoyed. “Could you have opened that window any louder? Not involving my friends means not involving my family too, jackass. I don’t want to explain this to my sisters.”

“You really should be thankful I was in a good enough mood to not to blast the whole roof of your shitty house off, Kurosaki,” you snap, wrestling with the newborn part of you that latches onto _sister_ and _family_ and begins, traitorously, to grow. Tearing it up and stamping it down sours that aforementioned good mood. “I can still do that if you prefer. Or you can shut your mouth and go Reaper already. I’m not gonna wait forever.” You take a step toward him.

The unusual squelching sound of it is what grabs his attention; he screws his face up in a whole disarray of different reactions and runs his hands through his hair with an explosive sigh when he glances at the floor. “Fuckin’—hold _on_ , okay? I’m coming, I swear, I just need a minute to get ready. And _you_ need to stop dripping all over my room. I’ll be back.”

The rain. Right. Kurosaki disappears into a different room and now that he’s out of sight, you become more aware of it than ever, how it makes your clothes heavy and clingy, uncomfortably like you’re wearing a corpse’s slimy skin. The scope of the cold is secondary, but very real—even Nelliel runs warmer when she lays at your side. You’ll blame the latter over the former for why you shudder and peel yourself out of your ensemble.

You’re wringing your jacket out on his floorboards when Kurosaki steps back in the room. “Here,” you hear as the door slides open, “dry yourself o—” and the rest of that word turns into a noise that makes you think Kurosaki’s swallowed his own tongue. You look up, catch one momentary glimpse of his agonized expression, and then he launches a bath towel at your face. You catch it, necessitating the release of your jacket, which falls straight back in the puddle you’ve spent the last few minutes squeezing out of it. God damn it.

“What the _hell_ , Grimmjow,” he says, as emphatic as a man can be while also sounding like he’s being throttled. “Do I even wanna _ask_ why you’re naked now?”

“Hey, that storm’s freezing. I told you I wasn’t gonna wait forever.” You jostle the towel through your hair before hanging it around your shoulders and bending for your jacket again. Kurosaki only then seems to notice the spreading pool creeping towards his bed and his face mottles.

He catches you off guard by not harping on that, but instead asking: “Wait, you’re cold? Hueco Mundo was one of the coldest places I’ve ever been in, how are you cold?”

You really don’t have an articulate response for that, not immediately. After a span of seconds where you’re sure he can feel the bewilderment radiating off of you, you settle for, “You fuckin’ tell me, I just am.”

“Huh.” He makes that face again, that subtly thoughtful one. If he meant for it to be a distraction, it works perfectly, because you go quiet the same time he does, turning the question over in the privacy of your mind while you finish drying yourself off. What the hell possessed him to ask something like that? Why would he even care to know?

And while you’re mentally chasing your own tail over this latest puzzle, Kurosaki steps too close and touches you. Not significantly—he just pushes your shoulder, not even hard enough to move you. He’s so full of life that the bare half second of contact with him feels like being branded with a glowing iron. You jerk back, bodily, just as he yanks his hand away in surprise.

“Wow, you weren’t lying. You feel like ice.”

There is not a name for whatever’s going on in your head right now—at least, not one that you know of. “What the hell is your deal?” you grind out. Something, someone, perhaps even several someones that have been long interred in your mass grave of a body are stirring back to life. You can feel them, and disturbingly, they have a voice exactly like your own.

 _I want more_ , they or it or you cry out, a demand you’ve heard every minute of every day, waking and sleeping. The place where Kurosaki touched you seems to thrum in the rhythm of that wail. _I want more! Give it back!_ _ **Give it back!**_

The heat fades, as heat must. You are going to do something monumentally stupid if you don’t hurry up and drown out your own head with adrenaline. It’s time to _go_. Your clothes are still damp, but you don them anyway with a few quick, violent motions. The storm’s lingering chill hushes the voices—they persist, but they can be ignored now. Your eyes don’t stray from him the whole time. Kurosaki sheds his body meanwhile, tread light and gaze circumspect. He hasn’t given you an answer. You wonder if he even has one.

Abruptly, you don’t care.

Garganta beckons. You take the lead, ensuring he’s inside before you slam the gate shut at his back.

* * *

The first step to surviving Soul Reapers was to never let them find you. Failing that, all you could do was pray you were strong enough to kill them—they would never let you live, so you were required to repay them in kind. Las Noches has stood vacant since the day Aizen fell; no Hollow within its walls was enamored with the notion of being penned in with the Soul Reapers when (never a question of if) the hammer fell. As such, it makes an ideal venue for a fight.

You step out under the false daylight. Kurosaki has been silent the whole way, and you the same. Now you turn to him as he draws alongside you. “Ready?” It’s all you need to say. This has happened many times already, and it isn’t going to happen again.

Kurosaki nods all stoic. Good, he knows the stakes and he’s not feeling the need to bandy words just yet. Suits you fine. You both go for your swords at the same time. The energy vented from the first clash punches a spiderwebbing divot into the stone under your feet. And you laugh, because this will never get old.

His bankai slides off your palm, strikes sparks off your claws. He seems to have gotten more limber, or maybe you’re only now noticing; he’s supple in stance where it counts, where he can directly parry your strength, and when he needs to avoid he bends like a windblown reed. Hitting him is harder now. But your philosophy has always been that nothing can dodge forever.

The first minutes of a fight are always a little fraught, until a rhythm has been established. When you two find your equilibrium, you give over to the well-drilled part of you that lives and breathes the hunt, subsume yourself in the workings of your own body. Your eyes are never sharper, your ears never keener than against an opponent like Kurosaki. He’s evading you, but you evade him as well—you can hear his blows coming, the air whispering off his sword. When he forces you to the ground, you kick his overhead strike away with a hind leg, translate the motion into a backwards roll. With your hands planted to vault you upright again, you couldn’t ask for a better opening for your Garra.

Kurosaki doesn’t have the distance dulling the weapon’s effectiveness running in his favor this time, and his shunpo is the tiniest bit insufficient. Three of the darts miss him; the remaining two pierce through his upper arm. It’s a vastly better start than the last time.

He staggers, but keeps on his feet, which you expect and delight in. “Damn,” he mutters through his mask, testing the muscle while you get back in stance. He blocks your next blow awkwardly, twists just out of reach of a third.

The voices are howling that same chorus again. You goad Kurosaki to shut them up. “Come on, let’s see your Getsuga Tenshou now!” you roar over the interminable mantra ( _give me more, i want it back, i need, need, need_ ). “Quit playing like you’re weak and give me all you’ve got!”

He paints the sky in flame, black as hell and twice as bottomless. You’re cackling to yourself as you ready Desgarrón, focusing the brunt of the attack into brutal points. The wave approaches. The muscles in your arm bunch, and you swing. The claw tips shred apart the shroud and split it to tattered pennants. Behind it, Kurosaki has come for you.

You guard your stance with a raised shin; the blade shrieks off, but it quickly becomes clear that’s not what he was aiming for. His free hand gets you by the tail. You have enough time to feel potent disbelief at the sheer temerity of the move before he yanks you off-kilter and leaves a deep gouge along the length of your forearm. Your yell is part laugh, part outrage, part approval.

He’s still stronger than you. That’s more evident as the fight wears on. But you’ve pulled even and you aren’t going to stop until you overtake him. That’s how hunting works. Along the way it becomes a sort of game, trading injury for injury. He breaks one of your ribs, smashing Zangetsu’s pommel into your side; the clean snapping sound sends a thrill of cold all the way through you. A cero he doesn’t quite dodge chars a line across his back and blisters even more. He severs the tendons in the crook of your left elbow, leaving the limb dangling and useless to you. Back and forth. Push and pull.

He’s flagging. You can taste it. Inside of you is a maelstrom screaming _there, eat, take it!_ Your heart pounds too quickly for you to hold them back any longer. With the deranged strength of the starving, you leap for him, arm outstretched. His eyes go wide, his guard comes up.

Slow. Too slow to repel you. The whole weight and momentum of your body hits him. It’s remarkable it doesn’t simply decapitate him; as it is, the heel of your hand shatters his mask as if it were crude pottery. And Kurosaki _screams_.

The sound is victory, euphoria. You smash him through the roof of one of the annex buildings, rubble all but vaporizing in your wake. A ribbon of his blood streams off past you like the tail of a meteor; inertia brings you to a dramatic halt much like one too. Chips of stone and Hollow mask erupt up from the point of impact, and the sound of it echoes thunderously around the chamber you landed in.

Kurosaki lives, incredibly; underneath where you crouch over him you can feel his muscles spasming as they try to shake off the systemic shock. His fingers grasp nervelessly for your hand, still covering his face; his breath is humid and tortured against your palm, something too oily to be blood slicking the area he so desperately is trying to protect. His eye, or what’s left of it, you wager. You aren’t going to give him the chance to recover. You have waited too long for this, you are too hungry, his body heat too overwhelming. The addition of his wounded animal cries to the feral shrieking in your head leaves you deaf to everything but the feast.

You pull his upper body off the ground by the neck, just far enough that you can sink your teeth into his shoulder. The gush of blood across your tongue turns everything to white noise, so boiling hot that it jars loose a delirious memory of the day your Fracciónes entrusted their growth to you, before you became arrancar. Edorad’s Volcanica had surprised you, how pyretic and molten it was, past his hierro. Nothing you’d eaten up to that point felt anything like that.

A sudden bright burst of pain in your scalp brings you back; there’s a hand fisted in your hair, slippery with gore and vitreous humor, hauling back as if to dislodge you. Kurosaki’s nervous system is back online; he writhes under your weight, as ferociously as his injuries will allow, spitting and snarling so he doesn’t whimper from the pain. “No you _don’t_ ,” you hear, iron-willed if wavery, and he twists a knee to knock at the rib he broke earlier.

Even in this, at the precipice of his death, he defies you. He resists you. He thinks he can _win_. There is something other than fury that flushes through you at the thought. You lock your jaw, intending to tear open arteries and doom him before you let it take root.

And because of your focus on that, you don’t notice his other arm, the one still holding his sword, slipping into the scant gap between your bodies until you feel a sharp, unmistakable line of ice against your throat. You go perfectly still, immediately.

“Grimmjow,” he pants, voice rough from strain; his hand is impeccably steady and the edge of his sword doesn’t tremble where it kisses your skin. “I don’t want to kill you. But if you leave me no other option, I will. Let go.”

The silence in the bones of Las Noches is total, absolute. The tiniest motion of a swallow opens a red thread across your neck. Kurosaki presses the blade firmer, so you can feel your heartbeat against its edge.

“Grimmjow. Last warning. You won, alright? You won. Let go. Please.”

Again, he begs—not for his life, but for yours. The clamor in your skull has started to quiet in fits and starts, eerily reminiscent of a comforted child. Your single clearest thought, in that instant, is that even though you are certain you could kill him before he killed you, it is no longer what you want most.

If you kill him, his warmth will irreversibly cease to be. And then what is left for you?

Glacially, you release your jaw’s grip on his shoulder, banishing your Resurrección, blunting your fangs. And you do not—cannot—move.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  
> NEXT CHAPTER LAST CHAPTER PROBABLY.


	4. segunda porción

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i think i've finally dragged this brainworm out far enough to qualify for the slow burn tag.

When it appears to Kurosaki that you have acceded—accepting your win without the consummation of consumption—he makes good on his word and lowers his blade, inch by wire-drawn inch. From somewhere far off you note how gingerly he moves; forcibly not-sudden, like he’s trying to escape your notice. You’ve only seen things move like that when they’re trying not to become your next meal.

He wouldn’t be wrong to assume you’d pick up where you left off, you think dispassionately—just sane. As you demonstrably aren’t, because you are crouching stock still and trusting that a Soul Reaper with a clean opportunity to kill you will turn his nose up at it, simply because you’ve never known him to lie. The moment that Zangetsu leaves your skin, you hold your breath and you sense him doing the same—both of you waiting for betrayal.

But nothing happens. There’s the clang of blade on stone, swallowed up by the sheer enormity of this empty room, and Kurosaki plants his arm and begins to try and get up.

 _No_ , scream the souls imprisoned in you, and they hijack your limbs, use them to shove him back down. It’s a hell of a coup, really; so sudden you forget that the left one is near severed. The adrenaline crash and the pain hit you all at once, and you do not struggle against the impulse to simply go heavy and boneless.

Kurosaki does. He yelps when you fall on him and doubtlessly aggravate a series of hurts. “Grimmjow—” he snaps, laced with a panic he can’t quite conceal, grabbing for your upper arms to push you off.

“Shut the fuck up,” you rasp. It feels like your mouth is the only thing you _can_ move without colossal effort. Something in you has quit functioning as it should. “I heard what you said, I’m not gonna eat you. Just... don’t fuckin’ move.” To your own ears your voice sounds static. You think you should be feeling something—horror, maybe—when it clicks that the reason for that is the sudden absence of the other voices that perpetually underlie it. Inside you, it is utterly tranquil.

Kurosaki draws a ragged breath; in, then out. “Oh,” he says, and doesn’t that just sum it all up. He makes a few aborted motions with his arms, as if not sure if he should still be trying to unseat you, before he unhands you and settles them on the stone at his side. Miracle of miracles, he listens to you for once—he turns shy of asking you stupid questions, even ones that would be perfectly reasonable in this situation.

So you do him a favor and ask one of your own. Why not. What do you have to lose? With your eyes half-closed and an ocean of calm filling the gaps in your soul, you breathe it into the seeping wound on his shoulder, into bare, warm skin. “What the fuck did you do to me?”

If he answers or if he even hears you, you’ll never know. Right there, on top of him, sleep pulls you into its embrace.

* * *

There’s a gap in your memory spanning the point where you wake up, in phenomenal pain, to the point where you step out of Garganta and into the early hours of the morning in Karakura with Kurosaki borrowing your shoulder for support, and you willingly lending it. The storm from the night has thinned to a misty drizzle, soothingly cool on your skin—for once, feeling overheated. It’ll take some time to acclimate to heat, in any form. If you ever do.

Before that, you’re going to have to come to terms with the possibility of wanting it. You’d probably feel more strongly in the negative if you weren’t so fucking tired. You’ll never admit aloud how much you’re depending on Kurosaki to stay upright at the moment—crossing dimensions with a bone broken and several more fractured is a fairly unique torment. But Kurosaki assures you that you’re almost there.

‘There’ being the residence of the girl who three worlds went to war over, the one who reconstructed your arm from the ether. Quaint little place, some far away part of you notes as you and the Soul Reaper phase through the front door.

Though he draws the line at just walking into her room. You’re not up to fighting him about it, so you let him call for her, your consciousness drifting some, acknowledging sensory input without attaching meaning to it. Twilit room, the smell of salt and iron, and handprints burning through your clothes, quickly saturating with blood from both of you. You’ve never been so calm.

She answers the third time he calls her name. The door opens with her hesitantly asking, “Kurosaki?” and the second her eyes land on you and the beaten, bruised mess the two of you are, her whole body goes rigid with a terrified confusion you can all but smell on her. “Kurosaki,” she whispers, “what—is all of this? And Grimmjow—?” Her eyes are darting, never still; they alight fleetingly on gashes and gore before scurrying off to the next, like a hunted rodent.

“I’m sorry,” Kurosaki says, all hangdog and soft. “I know it must be a shock. Even so, can I... can I ask for your help? Please. I promise I’ll explain.”

The girl has had a hand on her doorframe throughout this entreaty; you watch how her fingertips press harder and harder into the wood with every word Kurosaki speaks. When he finishes, they’re white and bloodless and trembling. She looks as if she may start crying. Yet, she drags in an unsteady breath and irons her jaw, turning her unshed tears to a diamond glint. “Of course. Hurry, come in.”

Standing proves untenable after being still for so long. Sitting’s not much better. Inoue guides you both down to lay on the floor. She touches you as little as she has to, purposefully avoiding your eyes. Her hands are a stark contrast to Kurosaki’s—transient, there-then-gone, and cold with nervous apprehension. You bury the observation under your exhaustion.

Without the need to focus on keeping yourself upright, you have no anchor to keep your mind from drifting, unresisting, into warm compliance. Passivity is not your nature, but you have little choice in the matter here; you can’t be healed if you don’t stay put under the shield Inoue throws up over nearly the whole span of the room. So you remain silent while Kurosaki explains—the bargain you struck, your presence here. He does a half-decent job of it, though conspicuously he omits your veiled threat against her and the rest of his friends. You feel no real need to remind him. The sick dread that would sallow their faces when you came for them unanticipated is something that you thrive on. If Kurosaki forgot, that’s his problem.

 _Your_ problem is one of desire. You are idle and so your mind moves double to make up for your body’s sloth. Under the soothing thrum of Inoue’s magic, the undercurrent of Kurosaki’s soft, deep voice, your thoughts are a jungle of conflicting dyads—anger and joy, hunger and satiation. At the roots of them all, there are questions.

What do you want? Why?

Few things daunt you the way the idea of untangling that mess in your current condition does. You’re almost grateful for Inoue’s voice slicing through, sharp and pained, and bringing your attention back down to the present. “You should have told me right away,” she’s saying, her breakable hands clenched in her lap. Your vantage point affords you a clear view of her throat working around some emotion you wouldn’t normally associate with her. “Kurosaki, why _didn’t_ you tell me?”

The boy manages to look sheepish with his eye jelly gumming its socket up and crusting down one cheek. His head ducks marginally. “I’m sorry. I am, truly, it’s just that I... I didn’t want to involve you in all this again. Any of you. I know you hate watching us get hurt.”

Apparently, that was not what she wanted to hear. Her face sharpens, her shoulders square. “I don’t like _this_ either!” she bites, jerking a hand towards you before snatching it back to her lap. “I hate watching you get hurt, but being surprised with it like this is so much worse!” A crack runs through her tone; she holds herself so stiffly it’s clear even to you that she’s doing her level best to not go to pieces.

“Ino—”

“No!” Kurosaki flinches and even your disdain chips at the force of her interruption. Her tears have finally spilled over, warping her voice. “I’m already involved, haven’t I been since the start? I’m your friend, I want to help you, so don’t—don’t _shut me out_ from now on, okay? Tell me about these things! I just... don’t want to see you take all this on alone.”

For a long few minutes, the girl’s quiet sniveling is the only sound in the room. Kurosaki, when you glance his way, wears the face of a man who’s had his heart cored out with a knife. He props himself on an elbow and sits—you can see how much it strains him to with the healing incomplete. Even so, he lowers his head, back rounded in capitulation.

“I understand,” he says, grave. “I’m sorry to have worried you so much. I won’t do this again.”

To you, the whole exchange is... incomprehensible. You’d never believe that Kurosaki could be made to prostrate himself on request, if you weren’t watching it play out before your eyes. You sit up yourself, intent on studying this phenomenon—hoping if you dissect it thoroughly enough, you’ll come to understand why witnessing it plucks a hauntingly familiar chord in your mind. Which part? Which facet of this interaction is the key? You can breathe without stabbing pain anymore, so your rib must be mended, but there is something _else_ stuck up under your diaphragm like a seed.

Your movement breaks whatever spell caused this. Inoue acts as if she’d forgotten you were even here; she throws you an alarmed glance, her shoulders instinctively curving inward, making her smaller, less of a target. Kurosaki follows up with a glare full of warning, like he thinks you’d renege on your promise right here and now.

Not likely. The only thing on your mind, now that you have nothing to study here anymore, is distancing yourself from this entire mess. The only thing you say is directed at Kurosaki. “Be ready for next time,” you tell him.

The boy turns your way, his resolute gaze redoubled now that his eye’s grown back. He nods, mouth quirking with something close to amusement, like he’s looking forward to it. You lock eyes with the girl, wondering if she noticed, daring her to say anything about it. Inoue holds your stare, and though her mouth is thin with fear, she has her chin tipped up in defiance.

You can’t stay here with them, feeling like this—feeble and longing and whatever the hell else this is. You turn your back and slash open a Descorrer to begin the trudge back home.

* * *

You eat, and then you sleep for a very long time, once you return. It is only after waking from the first dream of gold and summer that you realize how long you’ve gone without one, _precisely_ how long, and why. You spend the rest of that day hanging off the cliff of your own sanity by your fingertips, wondering wildly if this is what regression feels like—the voice that led for so long being drowned and assimilated into tides of identical ones. Like civil war.

The descent is slow, but unstoppable. If the ravenous muttering in you was a mere aggravation before, it’s downright maddening now that it has sampled the one thing that can sate it and then been harshly deprived. It’s your instinct pitted against your pride, but one loud assertion that you can handle this alone, that disavows your need, can’t possibly outshout the other thousands of you howling to be held.

But you try. You try, even though you’re doomed to fail, because you have never once lost quietly. You make your best attempt to satisfy, gutting Hollow after Hollow in search of that blessed heat, but all you find are cold dead things, weak and pathetic and angry and fearful as you gobble them down.

So very much like you.

On the heels of that damning thought comes desolate, helpless frustration. This new mouthful of Hollow flesh is no more filling than the last one you took and no more filling than the first one you took; you knew this endeavor was a fruitless one from the outset and there is no pretending otherwise anymore. Every Hollow you eat merely adds another lost soul crying out against your self-denial. Empty can’t fill empty, you _know_ that, and yet.

It never was like this before, you didn’t need—you didn’t _need_. How did this happen?

You knew the answer all along; you just needed a reminder. These days you’re at your most lucid when you’ve eaten and not yet gone to sleep to be tortured by visions of the things you crave; it’s during one of these brief periods that you find yourself staring once more at the spire where this all began, with no memory of consciously putting yourself on that path.

And Nelliel is there. The black-on-black silhouette perched at the apex with her feet dangling idly over empty space is unmistakable. How carefree she looks, how serene; no other Hollow you’ve known had a presence anything like hers.

If not for her...

You unsheathe your sword unthinkingly and launch yourself heavenward. You follow the thin, clear logic of a predator’s simple calculations, blindly determined that they’ll lead you out of the dark maze in your head. Nelliel broke you somehow; you’ll cut your recompense out of her flesh. She has something that you lack, a counterweight for the cavity in her soul. You’ll prize it from her rigored fingers and make it your own. Maybe then you’ll be able to hear yourself think again.

As you plummet towards her, you catch a flash of her eyes before impact; impossibly pale, brimming over with pity.

* * *

She has to break every one of your limbs to stop you, and she does it with a clinical ruthlessness and that same sad look on her face. It is an absolutely wretched sort of pain, the kind that would have lesser Hollows bawling and puking themselves. You don’t, as it overwrites the bedlam in your brain and gives you some kind of calm at last. You just... breathe. It feels like you haven’t been able to properly breathe in years. You still hate her, but now you can begin to think deeper about why.

She drags your sorry ass into the tower, arranges you carefully in your designated corner under the stairs, and sits beside you, unspeaking. You glare at her, clutching to this one grain of clarity you have left, and wait. If the pattern holds, she’s being reticent for dramatic effect and to teach you a lesson about patience or some shit like that. She’ll talk, eventually.

When she does, it’s not quite the question you were expecting to hear from her. “Was Ichigo right? _Do_ you want to die that badly, Grimmjow?”

Kurosaki. He’s complicit in this too. You don’t answer her, too caught up in memory. Not that it’s of any consequence to her.

“If you do, I’ll put you out of your misery. Is that what you want?”

It terrifies you down to the core that you consider it, if only for a moment. But no, that’s not what you want. If you were okay with dying, you wouldn’t have become a Hollow to begin with. You avert your eyes, scowling.

No, what you want is...

“I want to know what the fuck kind of curse you put on me and what I have to do to get the voices in my head to leave me the fuck alone.” It’s as close to transparency as you can make yourself get. Even that much is recognizable as improvement.

For the first time that night, Nelliel smiles, faint though it is. “So you want to live?”

“Yes I want to fucking live, did you hear me tell you to kill me? Stop beating around the bush and give me a straight answer, damn you! What did you _do_ to me?!” Your throat’s been raw from screaming for a while now; this newest outburst tears it and you cough when you inhale blood inadvertently, turning your head to the side to spit. It feels pathetic, but with your bones feeling like they’re being hammered on with every heartbeat, it’s all the truculence you’ve got.

“Nothing. I didn’t do anything to you. And I’m not going to hand you the answers you want so easily; it’s something you should figure out for yourself.” She rises and retrieves Gamuza; for a moment you think she’s going to sheathe it, but she comes back over to you and, too quick for you to do anything about, rams it clean through your right shoulder and at least a foot into the dirt below, pinning you like a bug.

“Stay there,” she says unnecessarily. “Do some meditating. Or jerk around until you cut yourself open and bleed out, if you’d rather do that. I’ll be back with food.” And she just—turns and leaves.

It’s not even that it hurts worse than the broken bones, necessarily, it’s just—you’ve had _enough_ of this shit.

“ _Fuck you!!_ ” you roar at her retreating back, and it makes everything hurt worse. You’re so far past caring about that. “You miserable _bitch_ , I’ll strangle you with your own fucking _entrails_ if you don’t let me up, you hear me?! Don’t just fucking walk away! Get _back here!_ ”

She doesn’t listen to you, predictably. You rage until you’ve lost your voice, but you don’t need that to tell yourself the honest truth.

* * *

Nelliel does as she said she would. She yanks her sword out of you, wipes it off, and sheathes it. She crams chunks of dead Hollow down your battered throat to salve your wounds. She beds down to rest in your arms, hands over your Hollow hole while your skeleton knits itself back together.

This is how it went wrong, the dully resentful part of you pricks, like a needle to the spinal cord. This is how your world got upended the last time. Don’t let her do this again. But that’s just one voice—your own—so it’s effortless to silence. You found, while Nelliel was gone, that the cacophony in your soul is like quicksand—easier to manage when you stop struggling.

Even so, you barely hurt her in that fight, like you’d intended to. The urge is not as pressing now, but you’d be remiss to deny yourself even more than you already have, now that you’ve admitted to yourself that’s what you’re doing. When your arms have repaired enough to only twinge when you move them, you take your sullen revenge by squeezing her against you, tight enough you hear her ribcage creak. Too much tighter and you’ll crush her but she doesn’t seem to care. She does the same thing back, forcing the breath out of you.

Quietly, against your clavicles, you hear her speak. “Are you going to let me help you now?”

Memories cascade. Inoue, tearful. ( _“Don’t_ _ **shut me out**_ _from now on!”_ ) Nelliel, stern. ( _“..._ _ **five**_ _Fracciónes.”_ ) Shawlong, Edorad, Ilfort, D-Roy, Nakim.

Kurosaki. ( _“I don’t want to kill you.”_ ) Kurosaki, who indulges your demand for a good fight because he _likes_ to. Kurosaki, laying pliant underneath you with his aggravatingly caring eye oozing down his face, maimed and mutilated but putting you first anyway. Kurosaki, who brushed a hand against your flank, as if he’d wanted to hold you while you were holding him down, and didn’t.

Kurosaki, vigorously, defiantly alive—strong as hellfire, warm as sunlight. Everything you want.

You shut your eyes wearily. You fucking hate it when she’s right. “Shut up,” you growl, loosening your hug. “Go to sleep.”

She chuckles and runs a hand through your hair. You’re dozing within minutes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GOTCHA. this still isn't the last chapter because i cannot make myself shut up!!  
> (it'll probably be the next one or the one after that)  
> ((and maybe there'll finally be some grimmichi in this grimmichi fic))


	5. barriga lleno

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> glassedplanets drew [a scene](https://twitter.com/glassedplanets/status/1336034517044195328) from this chapter and it's beautiful. i haven't stopped looking at it for five hours.

Nelliel wakes before you, this time. A song suffuses the air, light and soft as silk; no lyrics, only a low, comforting hum wending its way across your skin. Her thumb sweeps an incomplete arc around the edge of your Hollow hole, back and forth, keeping time with the rises and falls of her tone. The sleepy growl that gets caught in your chest brings it to an end, and it’s the little pang of regret that hits you that ultimately forces your surrender.

So, fine, you like this being held business; even if she’s not the one you want most to be held by. Nelliel’s won. You consider telling her to keep going, but like hell you’re giving her a chance to gloat over this so early. You placate yourself with a reminder that adapting to circumstance is what’s kept you alive in the past, so it’s unlikely to fail you now. You weathered Aizen’s tempest—you’ll figure out how to navigate this storm too.

* * *

For better or worse, you’re a creature that first and foremost runs off of impulse. You do make an honest effort at introspection, spending all of the time it takes to traverse Garganta mulling over what you intend to do, what you _can_ do, what you’re feeling. It gives you a bit of a headache, balancing that while keeping your footing on the null space of reishi, and you enter the material plane no closer to a complete plan than when you left Hueco Mundo.

 _Fuck it_ , you decide, when you reach the other side and are treated to sunset over Karakura—red-gold hues and bruise-tinted clouds, the air heavy and temperate. Why are you overthinking this? You’re not a schemer, never have been. This really is no different from any other hunger, or any other hunt. If your every thought has been circling inexorably around ‘find Kurosaki’, you’re just going to find Kurosaki and let the rest unfold from there. It’s an easy enough task, seeing as the Soul Reaper couldn’t mask his reiatsu if his life depended on it. He’s practically calling you to him, beacon-bright, as entrenched in your senses as the moon in the desert.

The fluttery excitement washing through you as you follow his trail isn’t quite the same as the thrill of the kill, but it’s close enough as makes no difference. He’s not even in sight yet and your heart’s running rampant in your chest. You’re so caught up in it that suddenly, there he is. You can’t remember choosing to use sonido to get to him but the distinct aftershock sound of it rings in the air, so you must have done.

In the split second before his reaction, you expect him to spook, perhaps trip all over himself reaching for a sword his physical body doesn’t carry and getting out of your reach, but he… doesn’t. He’s startled, and then he looks at you—really looks at _you_ , rather than seeing your mask and registering _Hollow, enemy_. The tension that seized up his shoulders at your arrival slackens and you hear a held breath sigh past his teeth.

“Fuck,” he says succinctly, eliciting a bark of amusement from you. “I was wondering when you’d show up again. Thought you might’ve picked too big a fight and gotten killed before I could get you back for last time.”

He still remembers last time, is your first, tingling thought. Immediately following it, the wry musing that he’s technically correct, just probably not in the way he’s imagining. Bravado’s what your instinct reaches for, thankfully, keeps you from considering giving voice to those other sentiments. “Don’t make me laugh. You think anything in that hellhole could so much as scratch me, Soul Reaper? I knew your spiritual senses were shit but I didn’t think they were _that_ shit.”

He replies with a blithe shrug and an expression with an edge of cockiness to it that hooks into your nerves and makes them sing a hundred wants both new and old. You can’t wait to trade blows with him again. You’re going to rip that smirk off his face, maybe with your teeth. “What can I say. Since Aizen went down, the Hollows showing up around here have all been small fry that don’t know any better for the most part. Haven’t had a proper challenge in a good while now, no chance to go all out.”

“Then what’re we waiting for,” you purr, leaning in with an all-fangs grin. Your fingers slide against the mouth of Pantera’s scabbard, brushing up against the guard, to take the edge off the itch to draw, to reach out for him. “Get out of that sorry meatbag and come back with me so I can put a couple holes in that ego you’ve grown while I was away, Kurosaki Ichigo.” His name rolls off your tongue like a riverworn stone, sinking and settling into the air. You’ll have to contrive reasons to say it more often, you like the weight in the rounded syllables.

He smiles at you. Challengingly, rebelliously, fiercely he smiles at you, zeal aglow in his eyes. You burn, you burn, you burn.

* * *

He makes you wait so he can notify Inoue (she’s not home; he scrawls a memo and pins it to her door) and drop off his things from school. You choose to trail along after him rather than stay put and wait, for no reason that you can readily identify. Perhaps it’s as simple as wanting to watch him, to make sure he won’t skip out on you, unlikely as that is. Perhaps it isn’t. Hard to devote yourself to picking apart your own motivations, when you’re so utterly focused on the task those motivations feed.

He does have to get your attention to remind you that you’re the one with the key into Hueco Mundo, the chagrin of which sobers you up sharpish. Right. You’re probably not going to arrive at the outcome you want if you give yourself away too early. How you’re going to twist the circumstances so that you’ve got a shot at it, that’s its own separate problem.

But, every so often, luck sides with you and resolution presents itself without you having to lift a finger.

“You’re acting weird today,” he informs you with his usual charming bluntness, on the slow journey back. Pretty ballsy claim for someone slipping and staggering on their reishi path to make, in your opinion—one solid boot will consign him to eternity floating in Garganta. He probably only dares because he knows somehow that you’re not going to do that. “Less murderous.” Behind you there’s a crunching sound like glass trodden on and the sharp ‘fuck!’ of him clinging to life by the fingernails. You turn to smirk at his struggles to haul himself up again.

“Looks like I don’t need to be, you’re gonna off yourself for me at this rate,” you taunt. But you take a step back anyhow and grab his wrist, yanking him all in one go up to safety. You can feel his heartbeat under your fingertips. Such injustice, that you have to let go of it so soon.

He rolls his wrist where your hand was, bemusedly massaging the muscle there. “Thanks.” If anything he eyes you a little more suspiciously.

“Stow it. I told you your head is mine, I’m not gonna let this dimension kill you before I do.”

“What a relief.” Oh. His thanks was genuine, the facetiousness in his tone now is practically cloying by contrast. “For a minute there I was worried you’d gone soft on me.”

“Ah, bite your tongue and choke, Kurosaki. You wouldn’t last a week in my world without that little toothpick of a bankai.”

“Are you calling me weak for carrying a sword?”

“Aren’t you?” You grin at his irked face. “I’d have eaten you last time if you didn’t have it. Tell me I’m wrong.” Just mentioning it deepens his frown, at the same time that it brings back the itch under your hierro—your body recalls it flawlessly even if your mind’s eye has unfocused the memory.

Kurosaki juts his chin your way the way only a man with a needled ego can. “What’s that make you, then? Unless you’re gonna try and tell me that’s not a sword you’re wearing there.”

“Fuck off, arrancar are different from you Soul Reapers. I don’t need a sword to tear you limb from limb.”

“Oh, is that a fact?” His voice changes, in a manner you can’t concisely describe. He sounds as if he’s congratulating himself for maneuvering you into a trap, but it’s less dire, less life or death than that. Almost... playful. “Wanna put it to the test?”

You scent opportunity like blood on the wind and hold your breath, a grin to match his smile threatening behind your mask. “Go on.”

“How about this,” he says. “No swords this time. No Hollow mask, no ceros. Let’s see who’s stronger when it comes to a bare-knuckle brawl.” The way he’s looking at you, his eyes on yours, unwavering and incisive, is completely unbearable. “Sound good?”

You really couldn’t ask for better. “Sounds like a hell of a time, Soul Reaper. You’re on.”

* * *

You consider it fitting, in a way, to do this in Aizen’s abandoned throne room. It’s spacey, unlikely to attract interruption, and a neat method of spitting in a dead bastard’s eye while you’re at it. Kurosaki seems entertained by the choice, it’s faintly visible in the lines of his face before you ascend to the second level to leave your two blades on the seat of a madman’s power. It’s gone when you level with him again, but you know what you saw.

Like before, you dispense with the holding pattern, the posturing and sizing up. Familiarity has made it unnecessary by now, and you’re both too keen to jump right into it besides. You go into this unsure what to expect from him, but he teaches you quickly in the opening. He’s no stranger to fighting hand to hand. He can fight hand to hand _extremely_ well, as a matter of fact, as he spends three minutes frustrating most of your attacks. He tattoos the shape of his knuckles into the spaces between your ribs while you’re busy processing that; your breath whooshes out all at once and the moment drops back on you like a ton of bricks.

Whether your giddiness is from the resulting lightheadedness or from the solid impact of his heat is irrelevant. This isn’t _exactly_ what you wanted all this time, but it’s getting there. It’s getting there. You just need to play it out. You laugh, breathless, and let him lead you on a chase around the spartan floor. He darts from the shadow of the dais before you can properly corner him into it and spurs you to him with the spark in his eyes, beckoning impudently. _I drew first blood_ , he seems to say. _You gonna do anything about that?_

You are. You go like a moth to the flame, you lunge for him, and the two of you dance together in the gloom.

The Kurosaki that you fight now is undeniably the same person and simultaneously worlds apart from the one you’re familiar with. Lacking the clumsy weight of a weapon, his forms turn away from the orthodox—there’s the framework of a proper discipline there, but canvased over it is the unrefined attitude of a street punk. He’s as likely to throw a crane strike as a haymaker, and telling which is coming next is entertainingly hard to predict. Yet there’s still that bullish refusal to concede ground, a tendency to redirect rather than avoid.

So like you, yet so different. Your inclination is to circle and strafe ever in search of some corner left unguarded. He’d have escaped having his lip busted if dodging was carved into his muscles like it is yours but he’s a step too slow and you feel his teeth scrape your hierro as your fist collides with him and blood spills, staining your skin and his.

You’ve killed weaker Hollows pulling punches like that, so you’re really not prepared to get socked in the eye immediately. It happens faster than it has any right to, a flash of light and black and sudden pain blooming. You reel back, hissing profanity, a grin splitting your face. He wipes the line of red dripping down his jaw with the back of his hand, smirking in spite of how it must hurt to. The longing part of you wants perversely to lick off the smear that he leaves behind.

“Not too shabby, punk,” you say as a means to distract yourself, lightly pressing on the hurt, adrenaline pumping blood through crushed capillaries. It feels good, like affirmation. “Fight a lot of Hollows empty-handed, do you?”

His answer is wry and full of grudging fondness. “Close. But we’re not here to talk about that, are we?”

He’s up to something, your intuition whispers. It’s in the way he holds his hands. You loosen up in preparation, shoulders dipping, knuckles cracking one by one. “No, we aren’t,” you agree, eyeing him, and your excitement slips past your lips and colors in your words. “You through holding back?”

Kurosaki blinks like he’s surprised, although you don’t know why. Isn’t he aware you can tell by now? A little scoff puffs out of him. “Guess I am. Ready for me?”

Always. You’d voice it if you had the time, but he denies you the chance.

What comes next you’d most accurately call havoc. You tear around and across the throne room, trading blows that fall like guillotines. He was playing defense that whole time—his offense is entirely unchained from propriety. He fights like there’s four of you surrounding him, each punch that comes your way has force like he had to tear his arm from another’s grasp to throw it. A narrow miss of one cracks one of the pillars holding aloft the infinite ceiling, the one he backed you into. His fist comes back trailing blood, where he scraped the jagged edges of your mask.

How long has he been hiding this? Too long, by your reckoning. You respond in kind, howling laughter as you form your riposte. He ducks and bowls you over but you figured he’d try something like that. It’s nothing for you to roll backwards and use the momentum to fling him bodily off of you towards the front of the room, recover and throw another punch his way. He tilts his head to the side just in time, and you completely shatter the throne behind his head, sending it raining to the ground in razor shards. On it goes. Inch by inch you gain ground, though he opposes you every step of the way, for once uncaring of the collateral damage.

He fights in the style of a desperate animal, tooth and nail in a bid for survival, but the raw gleaming amber of his eyes, the grin on his face, they say that he’s having fun. He’s having fun, even though in the places where your sharp edges touch him, violet and blue well up under his sunbeaten skin, and your hierro is as yet unmarred.

This is when you realize, in one of those flash-flood body-numb moments where time hangs dead in the air, that this is his consent. His invitation. He has no armor to protect him, no blade to wound you with, and he chose this. He set the terms of this encounter, knowing his odds were slim at best. All to tell you, with the essence of his soul as naked as you’ve ever seen it, that he will meet you halfway and not shy from contact.

It floors you just as surely as the sweep he catches your ankles with. You’ve been called reckless, and there are chances that even you balk at the thought of taking.

Is he fucking insane?

Your thoughts must be showing on your face, for his gentles as you stare up at him in all his lunacy. He knows you’ve figured him out. All that remains, then, is to play this to the end. He gives you ample opportunity to stand, rather than dive down for the kill, and his guard falls as you pounce on him. Arms wrap around your back, and you both go rolling, clawing each other for purchase until the ceiling and the floor stop rearranging themselves.

Not that it’s over—your little tête-à-tête has merely traded one technique for another. In the days before you walked on two legs, you wrestled your prey like this more often than not, scratching and snarling until they bent the knee and offered up their throats. Kurosaki knows the method too, it seems, clearly intent on fighting to the last.

In the frenzy you can’t see more than snatches of what he looks like, whenever you get free enough for a gasp of air, but do you really need to, with his heat so powerful and close? You’re each a mass of thorns, joints driving into whatever soft spot they can find, grinding each other down to something smoother. He smears blood on your throat from his wounded hand when he grabs it and tries to flip you over, you knock the wind out of him with a knee to the gut and reach for his limbs to restrain him. On it goes, you two growing somehow closer each time you switch who’s looking down on whom. You grapple at each other, incautiously. Desperately.

You could go on forever this way, but his stamina has a limit, and when he reaches it, his struggling gradually wanes. You sense it and pause yourself, staring down at him, an ache in every fiber of your being. Fatigue has made a shambles of his breathing, but he gives one last push. Nothing—you’ll not be moved from where you are, crouched over him in some preordained mirror of your previous encounter. He sighs out, ragged and mildly frustrated, and goes pliant underneath you in concession.

“Damn,” he says, half a tired smile on his face. It reopens his split lip, and he licks at it unthinkingly to stop the bleeding. “Almost thought I had you there for a minute. Good fight, Grimmjow.”

You affix the moment in your memory before you move on from it. “But you knew you were going to lose from the start,” you answer him, because you—you just have to confirm. You need to know you’re right. “Didn’t you. What the hell do you mean ‘good fight’?”

“I had fun. Isn’t that all you need?”

His brows are furrowed like he’s confused or exasperated with you but _he’s_ the one that isn’t making sense. “You lost,” you insist, because that should be self-explanatory.

“I’ll get over it,” he says bluntly, eyes rolling. “And I’ll get you back next time.”

“How were—what the fuck makes you think I’m going to give you a next time?” His certainty shakes you from the foundations up, and it’s increasingly difficult not to show that. You’re not going to kill him, but how could he _know_ that?

Kurosaki makes a motion that’d probably be a shrug if he was upright. “Are you?”

He _didn’t_ know. He still _doesn’t_. You are stunned into total silence, just looking at him. Just breathing. He returns it, and the longer you stare the more apparent the caution underneath his exterior becomes, all the breath he’s holding. How he waits in anxiety for your response, whatever it may be.

What can you do except what you’ve always done—take what you want, especially when it’s being offered to you?

Your own disbelieving laughter echoes off the rubble strewn around the room. “Kurosaki Ichigo,” you tell him, and he seems to unspool at the sound of his own name. “You’re a crazy son of a bitch.”

His relief is audible. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“You’re mine now.”

“I said something I _don’t_ know. Dumbass.”

He takes a fistful of the back of your jacket just as your claws sink into the thick fabric of his shihakusho and heave. In the frenzied scuffle to free yourselves of the layers, both garments are torn asunder, shredded white and black scraps littering the tiles. Underneath the cloth his body is as sunset, in coloration and in marking and in warmth. The sound that comes out of your throat is plainly humiliating in how full of need it is, but you for once can’t bring yourself to care. He’s _right there_.

You force yourself into his space, hooking your claws into his sweat-damp tender skin. You close your eyes as he does the same, and let time lose its meaning.

* * *

He missteps once, near the beginning—kisses your neck openmouthed and brings his teeth to bear on your skin. There’s not even the remotest possibility he’ll pierce your hierro with those puny things but every soul in your collective cries out with fear. You yank him physically back by the hair, uncaring that he yelps.

“What, what is it?” he hisses, reaching around for your hand.

You let him go, glaring. “Don’t bite me like that again.”

“I didn’t even—why?” He looks peeved but wary, rubbing at his scalp.

“Because I’ll make a matching left side for my mask out of your fucking jawbones if you do, that’s why. You really gotta ask?”

Comprehension dawns on him—you can’t put a name to the feeling that nestles in you when he doesn’t try his hand at comfort and instead only nods, solemnly so you know he understands. He avoids your vital areas, next time, breaks the bowstring of your tension with only the warmth of his breath and the soft, safe line his lips draw on your shoulder.

* * *

You lose the rest of your clothes, but you’re hard pressed to say when that happened exactly. It doesn’t matter, you think, as he rakes burning red lines down your spine with his nails and you breathe in the exertion and reciprocation on him, molding yourself like clay to his body. He in turn molds himself to you, fingers in your hair and legs entwined with yours, inhaling on your exhale. It doesn’t matter.

Your mark his heartbeat where your mouth sits at his carotid artery, tongue wetting his skin just slightly each time it tempts you with its song and scent. He could not stop you if you wanted to open it and glut yourself on his life, any more than you can stop yourself from wanting to, somewhere deep inside. It’s all too easy to picture it, scooping him clean of viscera and curling fetal in the hollow of his ribcage until his heat has become your own, but why would you? Why would you. If his heart ceases beating, the lullaby that soothes you is lost.

* * *

In a lull when you withdraw the barest bit to marvel at him, he raises a hand and traces a thumb across the estigma underneath your blackened eye, saying nothing about how you lean greedily into the warmth of his palm against your cheek. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen a Hollow get bruised before,” he muses.

“Well I can’t say it happens often,” you scoff. “Hey, tell me something. Was that payback for your eye?”

He hesitates a brief moment, gaze flickering, but he sounds not the least bit remorseful when he confesses, “Yeah.”

You snort and turn your head to nip the fleshy part of his hand, and tussle with him lazily when he smacks your temple halfheartedly for it. You left so many marks on him today, it more than makes up for all the ones erased by Inoue’s magic. He’s dappled in impressions of your strength, sounds in quiet groans and grunts that can’t all be pain when you squeeze them softly. He lays himself out for you, allowing exploration of the landscape you left on him, the hand on your cheek shifting so he brushes your mouth. He presses until he nicks his thumb on your fang and you lap up the heat with a shiver.

“Don’t let that girl touch these,” you growl softly a moment later, after you’ve wrapped yourself in his embrace again to remedy the chill encroaching on you. He marks you the same as you marked him, his hands a pyre and you the timber immolating.

“I won’t,” he vows, and as simple as it is, you know that from him it’s as binding as a chain.

* * *

You rest, at some point, once you’ve both worn yourselves completely out. Inside Las Noches, the stillness morphs into limbo, a liminal space where you and Kurosaki are all that is certain in existence. Are you dreaming, dead, alive, or awake? Who knows. Who cares. The heat bleeding from him into you is undeniably real, and you need to know nothing more than that.

You shift so your limbs won’t deaden from stiffness, intending only to loosen up a bit. Above your head, Kurosaki makes an incoherent mumble of a noise, the arm he’s laid around your waist tensing, to keep you close. In doing so, his hand falls to cover the hole in your back. Whether it’s an unconscious reaction to your motion or a deliberate—if sleepy—endeavor to keep you from leaving is unclear, but it doesn’t seem to matter—something turns soft and satisfied behind your breastbone all the same. When you settle yourself again, you lay so that the bone of your mask guards his throat.

It’s not love, you don’t think. You don’t love Kurosaki Ichigo. But you think of an eternity of this, moments you and he steal away for only this indulgence, and all that you are sings approval. You will do as is the nature of the beast you are and defend this thing that's yours with all the power and ferocity you possess.

And the beast you are is human, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I... don't know what to say really other than holy shit, this was never supposed to go this far. Starting out I knew this was a kind of weird concept so I didn't realize it'd be the EXACT candy some people were looking for, but knowing that it was was a huge factor in motivating me to finish it. So, unending thank yous to the people who cheered me on throughout (you know who you are).
> 
> Thank you all for indulging me by reading to the end of this incomprehensible nonsense!! If you wanna yell at me about it, I'm on Twitter @JoJo_LiFi or Tumblr @jojolightningfingers
> 
> P.S.: for those of you wondering if or if not Ichigo and Grimmjow did the dirty together, I'm leaving that up to your preference. The only thing canon as far as this fic goes is that they had very intense and passionate naked cuddles.


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